You may have realized at this point that you misread something early on—the Detective Story you’ve selected is Defective Story. Or, perhaps the Mystery is not what you had expected, but something entirely obvious and ordinary. Or, your assumptions about what you were reading or what you were reading for were straight off wrong. The color of the woman’s dress you cannot get out of your head must be important, musn’t it? There will be a death, most definitely. The important things will stay the important things on to the very end of it. But, now I have you thinking. The most special details, the better parts, will not figure into significance. The important words in the first half (‘my God,’ ‘myself,’ ‘my lover’) are now pointing at different things—or at least could be. (How could you know?) You were certain the setting was a parlor but now the interjection of buffalo grass has changed your mind. And then there is no one is going to die. How strange to have spent all this time trying to explain it and no one is going to die.
